A comparison of open architecture standards for the development of complex military systems: GRA, FACE, SCA NeXT (4.0)

Tightly coupled, poorly encapsulated, hardware and software implementations have resulted in systems that are rigid and fragile. These systems lack desirable architectural attributes including efficient extensibility, technology insertion, hardware and software portability, and effective use of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) equipment. The realization of flexible and robust systems without a supporting architecture is difficult, requires significant system rework, and precludes the concept of a product line. Three recently generated examples of standards intended to mitigate these fundamental engineering shortcomings are the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) promoted by the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) Joint Program Engineering Office (JPEO), the Government Reference Architecture (GRA) promoted by ARMY CERDEC, and the Future Avionics Capability Environment (FACE) promoted by The Open Group and sponsored by NAVAIR. In this paper we compare these three architectural standards relative to the concerns identified in each and the techniques proposed. We find that these three approaches promote similar key concerns and use similar techniques to achieve a loosely coupled, modular architecture that allows the realization of flexible and robust systems.